Hearings Hampering War on Terrorism?

And now the most absorbing two minutes in television, the latest from the wartime grapevine:

Hearings Hampering War on Terrorism?

Former Clinton National Security Adviser Tony Lake -- a critic of the Bush administration -- says the 9/11 hearings are now a -- "sad spectacle... [that] has become so partisan." What's more, Lake says the hearings are in fact hampering the War on Terrorism, insisting -- "we are losing valuable time and effort...I can't think of any war in history that we stopped after a battle and had hearings... We ought to get on with it."

But, Lake, speaking to students at Lehigh University and quoted by "The Morning Call," said Americans are now more preoccupied with watching the entertainment of pointing blame than actually solving problems.

Ombudsman on the Issue

Last week we noted the Washington Post reported that an August 6, 2001, memo warned President Bush -- "terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan."

The memo, in fact, said no such thing, and didn't even mention Manhattan. The Post's ombudsman now says the first paragraph of that Post report -- "can easily produce an image that suggests more of a specific warning about [9/11] than was actually in the text."

And so, the ombudsman says, it's fair to say the introductory paragraph was -- "misleading and conveying a political bias."

Political Storm Prevention?

The BBC, meanwhile, is sending thousands of its staff to classes on impartiality and balance. Participants say the two-hour seminars aim to encourage reporters and producers to think outside a left-leaning liberal mentality and reflect a broader range of views in their work.

According to London's Sunday Times -- owned by the parent company of this network -- BBC officials hope the seminars will prevent another political storm like the one last year, when the BBC was denounced for erroneously claiming the British government had -- "sexed up" pre-war intelligence on Iraq. In an email to its staff, the BBC says -- "We ... owe it to an increasingly skeptical audience to re-examine our core journalistic beliefs."

North Korea Now Name Calling

North Korea is calling Vice President Dick Cheney -- "mentally deranged" for saying last week that the Korean Peninsula should be free of nuclear weapons. But, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman says, Cheney's -- "reckless" and "disgusting" demands are nothing new, since he was -- "steeped in the inveterate enmity toward [North Korea] long ago as .... the boss of the neo-conservative forces in the U.S."

— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report